Open Source the new name for crappy software
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@blakeyrat said:
The vast, vast majority of people install a SSL cert once. Ever. Well, ok, once per product. Still, it's not something that you do five times a week, so the extra time taken to learn it is certainly not negligible.
Personally I find SSL certs in IIS 7 to be a headache. In my limited experience, IIS 7 always loses your CSR and refuses to complete the certificate installation process (since it has no CSR to match it to), meaning that you have to research how to install it manually using a "secret" MMC certificates snap-in (secret in that you have to launch MMC and add the snap-in manually). The certificate has to be installed as a "personal" certificate, which seems like a daft bit of nomenclature. Attempts to install the certificate manually can result in the certificate being installed despite an error saying that it didn't, or something like that – I forget exactly what I got, but a quick Google search indicates that IIS 7's certificate installation is prone to this bug. You just have to return to IIS 7's delectable configuration system and see that the certificate is in fact there, but just missing the friendly name that you have it (you have to go back and figure out how to rename it in the MMC). I haven't had a lot of joy with Exchange 2007 and 2010 either.
I don't know that I necessarily blame Microsoft – certificates are one of a great many technologies rife with fragmentation and excessive complexity and therefore endless compatibility problems, like VPNs and wireless, so IIS may be choking on some particular aspect of certificates that differ from the ones Microsoft were testing with. However, the Exchange 2007 and 2010 GUIs erode my confidence – many dialogs don't appear in the window list of Exchange Management Console's taskbar button, ctrl-pg up/down doesn't cycle through tabs in a dialog (but ctrl-tab does) – there are lots more signs that .NET (in which a lot of Exchange is now written) makes very little effort to conform to the underlying graphical interface. Instead of using MMC, or writing MMC2 which would be ideal (MMC was a great idea, just very poorly implemented and very poorly used), Exchange has its own custom interface full of inanities. (Yeah IIS and Exchange will be from different teams …)
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The funny issue about open-source software, is that teenagers have no problem making it work, while aged IT vets remain at odds with it. Makes one wonder.
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@olddog said:
The funny issue about open-source software, is that teenagers have no problem making it work, while aged IT vets remain at odds with it. Makes one wonder.
what
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@olddog said:
The funny issue about new technology, is that teenagers are more accepting and quicker to adopt it, while the aged
IT vetsoften struggle with it.Fixed that for you.
A behavioural characteristic that prevents people from moving on/up is not just resistance to learning new ways, but stubbornness in releasing/unlearning old ways. Given the speed at which IT moves, it's probably more obvious in the computing field, but it's actually prevalent everywhere to some degree.
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@blakeyrat said:
For just once, can I debate with someone who thinks rationally? Just once I want to have a debate like this without the opponent being completely delusional!
Now if only you weren't completely delusional as well, it would help a lot.
Some things might be more of a pain to set up in Apache than in IIS, but Apache is a more powerful tool overall. As well, Apache runs on a range of operating systems, so you can pick your system of choice, rather than being limited to one particular system. I know the "but everyone uses it" argument is a fallacy, but think twice. Do you honestly think that all those people choosing Apache on Linux over IIS on Windows are delusional? I simply can't imagine Apache being the most used web server product in the industry only because the people making such decisions are delusional.
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@pbean said:
Now if only you weren't completely delusional as well, it would help a lot.
Some things might be more of a pain to set up in Apache than in IIS, but Apache is a more powerful tool overall.
More powerful in what way, specifically?
@pbean said:
I simply can't imagine Apache being the most used web server product in the industry only because the people making such decisions are delusional.
You mean like how so many people are using XML because it is the greatest format for any and every kind of data ever?
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@Salamander said:
More powerful in what way, specifically?
I know there are many features I rely upon in Apache that don't (or rather, didn't) exist in IIS - things like suPHP, mod_rewrite, etc.
However, I'm aware that "more features" doesn't necessarily imply "more powerful". I'm also not an IIS admin so I don't know how far it's come since the v4/5 days (when I originally played with it).
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@pbean said:
Some things might be more of a pain to set up in Apache than in IIS, but Apache is a more powerful tool overall.
More powerful how? You mean how it takes more CPU resources to serve the exact same site?
@pbean said:
As well, Apache runs on a range of operating systems, so you can pick your system of choice, rather than being limited to one particular system.
Irrelevant for servers. Doubly-irrelevant now that servers are all virtualized.
@pbean said:
I know the "but everyone uses it" argument is a fallacy, but think twice.
If you know it's a fallacy and use the argument anyway (like nonpartisan and his comparison with Office of 15 years ago), that doesn't generally put you in the "non-delusional" category. At least not in my opinion.
@pbean said:
Do you honestly think that all those people choosing Apache on Linux over IIS on Windows are delusional? I simply can't imagine Apache being the most used web server product in the industry only because the people making such decisions are delusional.
I think it's much more likely that Apache is used more often by cheap-o hosting services to park thousands of domains, and thus the usage counts are skewed as fuck. Apache may be the most used web server, but I've never seen any real stats on the matter.
@Cassidy said:
I know there are many features I rely upon in Apache that don't (or rather, didn't) exist in IIS - things like suPHP
IIS can run each installed app as a different user.
@Cassidy said:
mod_rewrite,
IIS can rewrite URLs.
@Cassidy said:
I'm also not an IIS admin so I don't know how far it's come since the v4/5 days (when I originally played with it).
Of course, because God-forbid someone defending Apache actually knows anything whatsoever about the competition.
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As far as I can tell, equivalent functionality to mod_rewrite exists in IIS with URL rewrite.
As for suPHP, I do not know enough about users in windows and unix to know if there is an IIS substitute. You are clearly screwed if you are running apache on windows though.
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@blakeyrat said:
@pbean said:
As well, Apache runs on a range of operating systems, so you can pick your system of choice, rather than being limited to one particular system.
Irrelevant for servers. Doubly-irrelevant now that servers are all virtualized.I don't know much about apache or IIS, but this is clearly delusional. Well, it could just be ignorance.
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IHBT.
Damn Blakey, you provided what looked to be a measured, reasonable response, and I was trying to respond in kind. Fool me once.
@blakeyrat said:
@nonpartisan said:
(Full disclosure: admittedly it has been a long time since this has happened -- Word 97 maybe. But as a result I don't have it automatically generate tables of contents, or use master documents, or any of those features for fear that it is going to get all screwed up like it did. But how about the time wasted there?)
So:
a) You using the annoying-as-fuck open source tactic of comparing the current version of an open source tool to a decades-old version of the Microsoft tool
b) You are an idiot who doesn't use backups (nobody's going to say that Word 97 didn't corrupt documents occasionally, although my my experience 100% of the time that happened the document was sitting on a bad HD block, but you didn't keep backups? In 1997 when all software and hardware was 50 times less reliable than today? On a Fat32-formatted disk? Idiot.)
c) You're blaming us for the time wasted by your mental illness that causes you to refuse to use Word's time-saving features?a) I was saying it has been a long time since I used an automatically-generated table of contents due to past experience. And my major point was that I had to research how to do a ToC and read help files on it in order to get it right. Advanced features in Microsoft products are not just simple pointy-and-clicky as they make users believe. Fuck you're obtuse.
b) You're an idiot for making the assumption that I didn't have a backup. I remembered it was Word 6 and I was working on a project for my paramedic education. Because it was such an important project I was making regular backups (asshole). No, I didn't have backups back to the first day. I was noticing odd little things happening and thought they were related to Word -- I expected to clean them up later. It wasn't until I went back the next time I worked on it that Word completely wouldn't open the file. I went to the previous backup, re-edited my work and saved it. Next time I opened it, it was corrupted and wouldn't open. It dawned on me at that point that the corruption had started probably pretty early on in my document. I ended up copying and pasting text into a new document where I generated the ToC manually. So my statement still stands. If you think bad hardware was the only cause of corrupted Word documents, you have desperately limited experience.
c) Says the expert on mental illness . . .
@blakeyrat said:
Word is style-based. It also lets you select-by-style. Those features let you fix a document a thousand times faster than using reveal codes and scanning through the entire thing to find rogue "Bold" codes. Of course you don't know anything about Word, obviously, but I thought I'd point that out.
Yes, it is style-based. And how often do you see general users making effective use of styles? I haven't seen it on a regular basis. Seen any books that go in depth on styles? Word 2010 for Dummies gives 14 pages to it in chapter 15. Everything before that talks about character and paragraph formatting. Microsoft Word 2010 In Depth may be better -- it dedicates 36 pages starting in chapter 6. I would bet most people don't use styles on a regular basis.
@blakeyrat said:
@nonpartisan said:
That's why I thought it was so damn hypocritical of Microsoft to say that there would be such a steep learning curve if people switched from Office 2003 over to OpenOffice
Cite? When did Microsoft say that?
See [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051222160957/http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/policies_standards/etrm3dot5/responses/microsoft.pdf]Microsoft's response to Massachusetts[/url] after Massachusetts switched its document formation from Microsoft Office to the OpenDocument format.
@blakeyrat said:
@nonpartisan said:
I'm just guessing, as I have never used IIS.
Obviously.
I never claimed to be an IIS expert. You who have used it know that it is a four-click wizard. I'm saying that the help I'm finding on Google if I wanted to put up a secure site quickly doesn't show it to be a four-click wizard. I would be having the same first-time experience as Helix did with his FTP server.
@blakeyrat said:@nonpartisan said:
Regardless, in both IIS and Apache, once you've performed the function multiple times it gets simpler each time to the point where the extra time taken the first time is negligible.
The vast, vast majority of people install a SSL cert once. Ever. Well, ok, once per product. Still, it's not something that you do five times a week, so the extra time taken to learn it is certainly not negligible.
Well, ok, once per product. Well, ok, once it expires. Well, ok, once per Web site. Well, okay, once per . . . blah blah fucking blah.
Besides, if you're doing what you should, you document the fucking procedure. (Gee, that sounds like something Blakeyrat would say.) Just like you got from your provider.
@blakeyrat said:
Shorter, more readable, paragraphs?
- You're only capable of bullet points.
- Got it.
- No problem.
- I'll do bullet points from now on.
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@blakeyrat said:
@pbean said:
Do you honestly think that all those people choosing Apache on Linux over IIS on Windows are delusional? I simply can't imagine Apache being the most used web server product in the industry only because the people making such decisions are delusional.
I think it's much more likely that Apache is used more often by cheap-o hosting services to park thousands of domains, and thus the usage counts are skewed as fuck. Apache may be the most used web server, but I've never seen any real stats on the matter.
[url="http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-web-server-survey.html#more-5297"]Here.[/url]
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@Cassidy said:
Woah. You thought I was being serious? Towers of Hanoi? Fucksakes, maybe there was truth in my incredibly unfunny 'joke'. Or maybe you only skimread my post and then trotted out the obligatory boilerplate, which is actually pretty funny.@MascarponeRun said:
In reality, OSS is unimaginably shitty software in almost all cases. Let's not beat around the bush here: it's simply because most developers who are 'comfortable with the OS paradigm' are really fucking stupid, so their code and design practices are bloody awful. We all know it's true.
Again, I don't know why people are fixated on this idea. I use a lot of OSS (apache, cacti, mysql, php, postfix, fail2ban, awstats, iptables, xbmc, wordpress etc) and although I'm not tub-thumping about how utterly brilliant, idiot-proof and noob-tolerant it all is, I find it no better or worse than many of the closed-source products. Perhaps I've just managed to luck on a subset of OSS that works fine and only been exposed to low-quality proprietry stuff that the standards are close, but it's highly unlikely.
@MascarponeRun said:
Apart from a small percentage of very bright hippies/neo-communists, the only people who write OSS are those who can't get a proper job because they can't code Towers of Hanoi.
And yet I have read interviews with OSS authors that are developers/sysadmins/network engineers/project managers by day and volunteer their skillsets to assist in OSS development in their spare time, many of which are driven by a frustration of not being able to improve an existing closed-source tool so have taken it upon themselves to create their own. Granted, they're starting from existing use cases and someone else's concepts (thief!), but this seems bourne out of a rejection that things cannot change and people deserve better.
Look, I accept that not all OSS is a shining beacon of efficiency and brilliance. But in the last 15 or so years I've run my own webservers, mail servers, FTP servers, IRC networks, media centres; I've automated a lot of routine tasks and been pretty productive with OSS products. I often get people telling me I can do the same under Windows, or that there's some other applications that can do it for me - but the point is that I can't do it under Windows (simply because I don't know how to) and advocates of those applications can't sell me on the benefits of using their suggested application over the OSS product I've already implemented. Perhaps I'm blinkered because I've spent so long in that environment, but one of the reasons OSS isn't adopted for more widespread use is this outdated notion that it's automatically crap.
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@nonpartisan said:
LaTeX
This word vs latex thing really pisses me off. Latex is a great system for writing complex texts, full of equations, and tables, and pictures, if you hate yourself and want to suffer needlessy.
There's only one thing latex is really good at: writing long and complex equations, even though since word 2007 the MS equation editor is not too bad either. Unless you're writing a mathematics or theoretical physics book, you have no need for that anyway. Only other thing that's better with latex (if you have the patience for learning bibtex) is bibliography management; the word bibliography tool is too limited, I had use an add-on for that.
Master documents, tables, styles, layouts, table of figures, references, whatever? You can do it all in word, and all the training needed is a few hours looking it up. It's not hard, and certainly not as hard as learning how to make latex fucking put the figures where I fucking want them ([h!] works if you have only 1 figure in the column, god forbid you need more than 2!) or set the margins like I want them or put a landscape page inside a portrait oriented document (just do like this, unless you also want the pdf to display it as landscape, unless it has a table inside, etc).
Not to mention how idiotic the "tabular" environment is: try inserting a long table (like, 100 rows) without some plugin to export from office, and then we'll talk about how great latex is.
Seriously, fuck latex.
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@blakeyrat said:
@nonpartisan said:
(Full disclosure: admittedly it has been a long time since this has happened -- Word 97 maybe. But as a result I don't have it automatically generate tables of contents, or use master documents, or any of those features for fear that it is going to get all screwed up like it did. But how about the time wasted there?)
So:
a) You using the annoying-as-fuck open source tactic of comparing the current version of an open source tool to a decades-old version of the Microsoft tool
Apart from the fact that he was comparing the version of LaTeX which was current at the same time as Word 97 to Word 97. But hey, if you apply common sense you can't rant as effectively.
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I've said this before, but … I used to run Word 6, and pretty much everything you needed existed back then – revision tracking, master documents, stylesheets, you name it.
I'm really not sure what's changed since the early 90s, besides replacing WordBasic with VBA [1], and the ribbon, which IMO makes finding commands in the sea of tabs just as difficult as the sea of menus, as it doesn't solve the underlying problem that categorising hundreds of commands in a way that's completely intuitive is hard. I'd like a "Command: ___" box where you just type what you want and Word finds it via autocomplete, maybe a "Find me" button that shows you were you were meant to be looking. Not a command line as such, just an "I know it's called Page Layout and I can't find where the hell you've put it this time Gadget, so just give it to me!" box.
Considering that hardly anyone is aware of all the features that have been in Word for over 17 years, Word seems a tad overpriced now.
[1] If Microsoft had learnt from Apple and kept the scripting modules outside of the documents, the whole macro virus malarkey would have been prevented.
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@MascarponeRun said:
Woah. You thought I was being serious? Towers of Hanoi? Fucksakes, maybe there was truth in my incredibly unfunny 'joke'. Or maybe you only skimread my post and then trotted out the obligatory boilerplate, which is actually pretty funny.
Erm... I was tired... I haven't distinguished trolls from real.. erm...
Oh, fuck the backpeddling. Yah, I didn't read it properly. Dunno the reasons behind it, but ultimately I still misread it somehow and reacted in my way. Arse. Ignore my last.
Yup, that's me standing with a frown whilst everybody around me laughs. Doh!
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
and the ribbon, which IMO makes finding commands in the sea of tabs just as difficult as the sea of menus, as it doesn't solve the underlying problem that categorising hundreds of commands in a way that's completely intuitive is hard.
Not that you care, because you're a fucking geezer luddite who hates everything new, but the entire point of the ribbon is to address that problem, and research shows it does a pretty fucking good job of it.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I'd like a "Command: ___" box where you just type what you want and Word finds it via autocomplete, maybe a "Find me" button that shows you were you were meant to be looking. Not a command line as such, just an "I know it's called Page Layout and I can't find where the hell you've put it this time Gadget, so just give it to me!" box.
That (surprisingly, coming from you) isn't a terrible idea. Windows uses a similar concept for finding Control Panels in Vista and Windows 7 (not that you've used those, being a fucking geezer luddite who hates everything new).
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Considering that hardly anyone is aware of all the features that have been in Word for over 17 years, Word seems a tad overpriced now.
Then don't buy it. Good thing nobody's holding a pistol to your head forcing you to!
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
[1] If Microsoft had learnt from Apple and kept the scripting modules outside of the documents, the whole macro virus malarkey would have been prevented.
What are you talking about? Claris/AppleWorks scripting was stored in the file. Unless you're talking about AppleScript? Maybe?
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I'm really not sure what's changed since the early 90s
Home and office desktop computing has seen many advances, surely the most important of which have been:
OSX: the genie effect, animated windows, floopy alert dialogs, dropshadows large and dark enough to rival a thunderstorm's clouds. Overlays.
Windows Vista: Aero glass, live thumbnails, Winkey+Tab. Fading.
Windows 7: Slightly blurrier Aero glass.
Ubuntu: Rubber windows (off by default). Orange progress bars. Shit-brown titlebars. Less.My, were it not for the near-stagnation of innovations in UI and features, computers today would be nearly unreconizable to a user from the early 90s. Fortunately, such a person can sit down at a modern computer and discover absolutely no noticable change in overall performance, while doing the exact same things and being exactly as productive.
Rest easy, for there is no clock tick CPU-makers can add that software programmers can't absorb and do no useful work with whatsoever. Since upgrading my CPU to a PhenomII 4×3.6GHz, the water in From Dust has never felt flowier.
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@blakeyrat said:
Not that you care, because you're a fucking geezer luddite who hates everything new, but the entire point of the ribbon is to address that problem, and research shows it does a pretty fucking good job of it.
This sort of screaming ad hominem doesn't help anyone.
I don't have any bias for or against new ideas. If I could go into Word and intuitively find commands using the ribbon in the way that menus often hinder, great. Goodness knows the menus in Office aren't any easier. I just feel—and I made it clear that this was just my opinion—that it doesn't resolve the issue of trying to categorise a vast number of commands into a hierarchy, moreover because the layout is non-linear and not self-consistent and harder to skim. Don't forget that much of the world is moving over to search and tags in order to escape hierarchy for precisely these reasons! Hierarchical classification is frequently difficult, doubly so the ribbon where you still have to guess which tab something is going to be in, and now where, and now also what it looks like, and whether it's hidden in one of those tiny arrows. But that's just my personal experience.
One of the things I find annoying about Vista, by the way, is that I'm so used to Windows 7/Server 2008's extended search capability from the start menu, that Vista seems half-finished and more tedious (since it couldn't yet control panels).
Of course I like the extended search features in Vista and 7 – are you mad?
@blakeyrat said:
What are you talking about? Claris/AppleWorks scripting was stored in the file. Unless you're talking about AppleScript? Maybe?
Really? Ugh. Most programs kept AppleScript scripts in separate files, invoked from the script menu. Actually it's rather disappointing that Apple/Claris made the same mistake as Microsoft there …
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@dhromed said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I'm really not sure what's changed since the early 90s
Home and office desktop computing has seen many advances...
Way to quote out of context. I was talking about Word's core feature set, where all the features that are being advocated here, were already in Word in the mid 90s.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Way to quote out of context. I was talking about Word's core feature set, where all the features that are being advocated here, were already in Word in the mid 90s.
I believe my post is entirely relevant to that sentiment, and you are now expected to laugh at my hilarious post, or, at minimum, smirk quietly to yourself.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
This sort of screaming ad hominem doesn't help anyone.
I don't have any bias for or against new ideas.
I'm not fresh out of the womb, I've seen you post here before. Liar.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I just feel—and I made it clear that this was just my opinion—that it doesn't resolve the issue of trying to categorise a vast number of commands into a hierarchy, moreover because the layout is non-linear and not self-consistent and harder to skim.
Your opinion is factually wrong. Just as much so as if you said, "in my opinion, gravity pulls objects up away from the Earth's surface." That's exactly what I'm trying to get across to you.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
But that's just my personal experience.
Which says absolutely nothing about the usability of the software.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Really? Ugh. Most programs kept AppleScript scripts in separate files, invoked from the script menu.
Except AppleScript is for system scripting, not document scripting. It's in a separate file because for all the system knows, the AppleScript relies on 36 files being present, only 10 of which are Claris/AppleWorks files. AppleScript is in separate files out of necessity.
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Just for the record (I'm not going to waste time arguing anything else) — would I want to go back to using Acorn MOS (from 1981–2)? No. Would I want to go back to using MS-DOS? Hell no (what were they thinking with that?) Windows 3.11? No. Classic Mac OS, as great as it was? No. Windows 2000? No.
I'm disappointed if you genuinely believe that my perspective is that no progress has ever been made. What I do find is that people take notice of complaints, but ignore praise, then complain that nothing good is said. I think that's just humanity for you – no-one wants to hear anything good. Just look at the state of news reporting and its negative bias – murders, deaths, disasters, but rarely anything good! (Maybe this is just a British thing.)
At the moment I use (a heavily customised) XP, 7, Server 2003/SBS 2003, Server 2008/SBS 2008 and Server 2008 R2/SBS 2011.
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Re: Open Source the existing name for crappy unmaintained throwaway software
Update on this:
- Please note that this isn't some unknown project, but Filezilla was in fact " voted the best networking program in the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards"
- I used the installer as suggested by the support ticket, BUT IT DID NOT WORK. The admin console still pops up on the desktop every time I log in..... AAGGGHHH.
Hopefully my tests will be done soon and I will uninstall this shitware.
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404 :)
FileZilla Client (I know you mean the server) – great in Windows (even with the head-in-sand and molasses development process) but oh boy, you ever used it in Mac OS X? It's like the anti-poster-child for cross platform graphical development …
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
FileZilla Client (I know you mean the server) – great in Windows
... no? It's shit.
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How much is the popcorn?
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@blakeyrat said:
That (surprisingly, coming from you) isn't a terrible idea. Windows uses a similar concept for finding Control Panels in Vista and Windows 7
I've been dealing with a Vista machine lately, and having gotten used to KDE and Windows 7, Vista's search is very painful. It hasn't found a single control panel thing for me yet. All it seems to find are documents or pages out of browser histories.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I just feel—and I made it clear that this was just my opinion—that it doesn't resolve the issue of trying to categorise a vast number of commands into a hierarchy, moreover because the layout is non-linear and not self-consistent and harder to skim.
Your opinion is factually wrong. Just as much so as if you said, "in my opinion, gravity pulls objects up away from the Earth's surface." That's exactly what I'm trying to get across to you.
WTF? Are you claiming that the usability testing was 100% totally absolutely obviously that the ribbon was always better? I seriously doubt that. Or maybe you're just illiterate regarding statistics. Obviously, MS goes with what works the best for the most people, and generally, the rest of them can get along. But I'm sure your confidence in a statistical result can overcome anyone's individual experience.
So a better analogy here would be for you to say that nothing ever gets off the ground due to gravity after Daniel talked about flying his plane. But the abuse and obviously incorrect assertions make for an angrier post, so keep it up.
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
I think his point is that Daniel said the ribbon didn't do what it was supposed to, whereas Microsoft did usability testing to prove that it did do exactly that. Had Daniel phrased his comment like a personal opinion (i.e. "I feel that it's harder to use" vs "It doesn't accomplish what its goal is") you would have heard a different blakeyrant, although it would have been along lines similar to Microsoft usability testing.@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I just feel—and I made it clear that this was just my opinion—that it doesn't resolve the issue of trying to categorise a vast number of commands into a hierarchy, moreover because the layout is non-linear and not self-consistent and harder to skim.
Your opinion is factually wrong. Just as much so as if you said, "in my opinion, gravity pulls objects up away from the Earth's surface." That's exactly what I'm trying to get across to you.WTF? Are you claiming that the usability testing was 100% totally absolutely obviously that the ribbon was always better? I seriously doubt that. Or maybe you're just illiterate regarding statistics. Obviously, MS goes with what works the best for the most people, and generally, the rest of them can get along. But I'm sure your confidence in a statistical result can overcome anyone's individual experience.
So a better analogy here would be for you to say that nothing ever gets off the ground due to gravity after Daniel talked about flying his plane. But the abuse and obviously incorrect assertions make for an angrier post, so keep it up.
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@Sutherlands said:
I think his point is that Daniel said the ribbon didn't do what it was supposed to, whereas Microsoft did usability testing to prove that it did do exactly that. Had Daniel phrased his comment like a personal opinion (i.e. "I feel that it's harder to use" vs "It doesn't accomplish what its goal is") you would have heard a different blakeyrant, although it would have been along lines similar to Microsoft usability testing.
See, it really seemed to me that Daniel was giving his personal opinion about that feature, but in a much more reasonable way than, "teh ribbon suxx0rs" (emphasis mine):
@Daniel Beardsmore said:...and the ribbon, which IMO makes finding commands in the sea of tabs just as difficult as the sea of menus, as it doesn't solve the underlying problem that categorising hundreds of commands in a way that's completely intuitive is hard.
Partly, my reaction is because watching statistical illiteracy makes my brain hurt similar to what bad installers must do to blakeyrat. Fortunately, he never said anything about stuff being "statistically significant," but a finding based on a large sample, especially when dealing with human perceptions and reactions, is not the same as being "factually correct" for all situations, etc. Now, blakeyrat will say that he didn't mean what he said.
Personally, I kinda like the ribbon. The main thing they got wrong was the initial rape of the file menu and the round logo button. Otherwise, I actually like the ribbon on the rare occasion that I use it.
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@boomzilla said:
I've been dealing with a Vista machine lately, and having gotten used to KDE and Windows 7, Vista's search is very painful. It hasn't found a single control panel thing for me yet. All it seems to find are documents or pages out of browser histories.
So far as I know, Vista's Start menu search does not include control panels; I believe that was introduced in 7. In Vista, you have to open Control Panel first then use the search panel there, which was obvious and nifty at the time Vista came out, but is now an annoyance having got used to the improvements in 7 (which is basically how I see Vista – a broken Windows 7).
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@boomzilla said:
Fortunately, he never said anything about stuff being "statistically significant," …
I tried to suggest, obviously badly, that it’s going to be difficult to arrange for the ribbon’s contents to be intuitive to everyone. Some people will find it more logical, others will find it more confusing. In my experience, some people just never get it, others don’t complain and seem to get on with it fine.
My reasoning for this is that, if you take 100 commands, and try to group them into, say, seven categories, you’ll struggle to find seven clean divisions where every command can be intuited to be in a precise category (I also question the need to scrutinise each tab in two axes looking to see how the command is represented – image, text, dropdown etc). For example, a lot of items are just lumped into the initial ribbon tab, which is a sort of “catch-all” for anything common that doesn’t belong anywhere else. For me personally the end result is that I’m back to the same rote learning exercise that I had with the classic menu system, giving me that “get off my lawn” feeling with having to re-learn someone else’s illogical categorisation.
It all depends whether your mind works well with Microsoft's categorisation. And my categorisation process is unusual.
That’s why I was thinking that if I could just type in the name of the operation, and have it highlight the command (like Mac OS X’s System Preferences search), then I’d save the effort of endless scouring, and begin the rote learning process all over again. The scouring phase is what makes it so time consuming, and that’s just as true of menus – the hard part is rote learning where everything is hidden. I’m not arguing that the ribbon is “evil”, or worse, but that for me it’s not demonstrably better. Obviously everyone’s experience will vary!
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@Helix said:
- Please note that this isn't some unknown project, but Filezilla was in fact " voted the best networking program in the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards"
First link is broken, second takes me to 2008 awards, none of which mention FileZilla.
I know that the FileZilla client won awards - but not seen any mention of the FileZilla server that's caused you so much trouble.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
I tried to suggest, obviously badly, that it’s going to be difficult to arrange for the ribbon’s contents to be intuitive to everyone. Some people will find it more logical, others will find it more confusing. In my experience, some people just never get it, others don’t complain and seem to get on with it fine.
I think it's as simple as that you wrote IMO when you meant IME - you're not wrong that it's a hard problem to solve, and Blakey's not wrong that the ribbon is significantly more usable, to most people, than the previous structure. I'd even go as far as to say that the only advantage you might find with the old system is that you have already, slowly and painfully, learned where things are.Where you're going completely wrong is to say that Word has no new features. There's little in Word which wasn't in Wordstar in terms of functionality, but it's become increasingly accessible and people - you know, those ordinary users - are in fact using more and more of it. Early versions of Word gave a graphical interface to word processing, but only to the core word-processing functions. Now, it's all (or almost all) far simpler to use. If you're high enough up the techie food-chain, you'll find it hard to point to differences between Word now and Word then - but you'll also find it hard to point to differences with Wordstar.
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I did say "core features" for a reason, i.e. not the UI, but the actual features. Obviously Word is cutesy now – which itself is an achievement given how many developers still cling to the hideous old 16-colour-icon look (argh wtf). It remains to be seen whether people really learn features such as styles, bullets and numbering now that the ribbon makes them more obvious, but my experience is that people still ignore everything in the UI that they don't believe they need – it's human nature to ignore the superfluous information in the world around us, for example what model of bus or class of train you travel to work in (and whether it still has an old Stone Faiveley AMBR pantograph ;-) ) What you haven’t pointed to is actual core features that are new, as opposed to UI changes or enhancements, but it's an interesting point that I'll take into consideration.
I believe that the problem with Word is less the UI, and more the fact that far fewer companies now are willing to train their staff! We covered Office at school, where one of my friends got told off for using an Excel macro in class, as the teacher, the school's only IT teacher, was intimidated by anyone who actually understood computers! My programming lessons, in BBC BASIC, in 1993 or 1994 (!!!) (for non-Brits, it's a 1981 procedural BASIC, and we had "newer" 1985 hardware) were given by a biology teacher who wasn't even trained how to work the BBC BASIC line editor, so the class was told that typos necessitated re-entering the program from scratch. It's no wonder that the younger generations don't know jack about computers in this country.
I agree that better UI helps people learn, but the problem is that people don't have a self-learning ethic with computers, that desire to expirement, read the help, press ctrl-everything to see what happens. To most, computers are too magic for them to comprehend the line between possible (and therefore possibly implemented) and unlikely or outright impossible, or to even imagine what could be possible, such as conceiving that Word could, gasp, automatically number your paragraphs for you and manage all the nested numbering levels – most people won't even guess that Word can even do that. I imagine most can't differentiate Word from WordPad, except Word is more complified.
But then, by your argument, Word 6 and 2003 are still the same, as the entire UI never changed in that period (6 introduced the modern Office UI that remained—gradient fills and higher colour depths notwithstanding—until it was replaced it 2007), which is why it’s all the more sad that .NET still doesn’t incorporate all the UI features that the Office team have kept to themselves for so long, and that everyone else endlessly re-implements badly. I use (and beta test) Royal TS, and despite being .NET 4, most of the UI comes from DevExpress (including the entire ribbon implementation), because the developers can't get anything consistent or useful out of .NET itself, which for me completely defeats the objective of .NET, as one of Win32's greatest weakness is its awful windowing and toolkit API! (And I'm not a Win32 developer, but isn't a resizable window as simple as maintaining a linked list of HWNDs and anchor points (top, left, right, bottom) and walking this on resize events? Yet MS couldn't even cook up something for all the absurdly tiny dialogs that persist into 2008 R2, such as file permissions.) But that's besides the point :-)
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@Cassidy said:
@Helix said:
- Please note that this isn't some unknown project, but Filezilla was in fact " voted the best networking program in the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards"
First link is broken, second takes me to 2008 awards, none of which mention FileZilla.
I know that the FileZilla client won awards - but not seen any mention of the FileZilla server that's caused you so much trouble.
THAT IS MY POINT - they are broken on the filezilla web page
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@Helix said:
THAT IS MY POINT - they are broken on the filezilla web page
Okay.. well.. given that from your post I couldn't distinguish between links manually added versus quoted content containing broken links - and there was nothing more added to put it into context - I'm afraid your point wasn't too clear to me (or someone else, it seems).
Thanks for clearing that up.
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@blakeyrat said:
@nonpartisan said:
That's why I thought it was so damn hypocritical of Microsoft to say that there would be such a steep learning curve if people switched from Office 2003 over to OpenOffice
Cite? When did Microsoft say that?
Several samples of those, if you're interested.
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/en-us/why-microsoft/pages/openoffice.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=faaf9eb8-77c6-4bed-bc08-c069a7bfbb04
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I don't agree that "Open Source" is the new term for crappy software. (If you research the whole "Open Source" vs. "Free Software" debate, you'll find that the term "Open Source" is almost meaningless anyway.) But I do abhor FileZilla (the client, at least) and all the other "pretty" FTP programs out there. I really, really do not need a GUI front end for FTP. The instant someone uses one of these things (vs. the built in "ftp" command) I lose a great deal of respect for him or her.
The same goes for GREP... words can hardly describe my disgust the first time I opened PowerGREP. WTF does any of that have to do with GREP?
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@bridget99 said:
I really, really do not need a GUI front end for FTP.
Just out of curiosity, for someone using Windows, what would you recommend? (Bearing in mind that Windows command line FTP is unlikely to have REST (resume) support, is not firewall friendly, and defaults to TYPE A, which burnt me once when I needed to save some work offsite before logging off, so I sent it home via command-line FTP and came home to a corrupt file.)
But then, I've even taught a girl how to use Windows command line FTP, and she carried on using it voluntarily.
@bridget99 said:
The same goes for GREP... words can hardly describe my disgust the first time I opened PowerGREP. WTF does any of that have to do with GREP?
Right idea, but overkill. BBEdit on the Mac gets this right, with a tight
settingssearch (oops) dialog and a nice grouped results window, from which you can even delete unwanted results.
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@bridget99 said:
But I do abhor FileZilla (the client, at least) and all the other "pretty" FTP programs out there. I really, really do not need a GUI front end for FTP. The instant someone uses one of these things (vs. the built in "ftp" command) I lose a great deal of respect for him or her.
I lose a great deal of respect for anyone who stubbornly thinks that command line tools are always the be-all end-all of problems.
I use both GUI and command line depending on what is more convenient, and frankly, more convenient tends to side towards "install a browser's FTP plugin", which tend to be a (SHOCK!) GUI.If I'm using source control, I'm also likely using a terminal, so I use the command line for it.
If I'm renaming a bunch of files, I could use the command line for it, but I'd rather use Thunar's bulk renamer; a graphical program.There's something to be said for usability.
@bridget99 said:
The same goes for GREP... words can hardly describe my disgust the first time I opened PowerGREP. WTF does any of that have to do with GREP?
Thats a valid complaint- GREP is a utility program whose main benefit comes from being used as part of a pipeline- something which is not easy with a GUI.
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@Salamander said:
@bridget99 said:
The same goes for GREP... words can hardly describe my disgust the first time I opened PowerGREP. WTF does any of that have to do with GREP?
Thats a valid complaint- GREP is a utility program whose main benefit comes from being used as part of a pipeline- something which is not easy with a GUI.Glancing at the screenshot on their front page, TRWTF there is that they seem to have every feature represented by some little sub-window or check box or whatever. Of course, a lot of that is to replace the functionality of the shell (e.g., globbing). So while the GUI perhaps makes these things more discoverable, it's a real mess. Perhaps there's a cleaner way to do it, but I think they're unlikely to convert many people.
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That PowerGREP GUI hurts my eyes...definitely made by people not used to working with GUIs.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Just out of curiosity, for someone using Windows, what would you recommend? (Bearing in mind that Windows command line FTP is unlikely to have REST (resume) support, is not firewall friendly, and defaults to TYPE A, which burnt me once when I needed to save some work offsite before logging off, so I sent it home via command-line FTP and came home to a corrupt file.)
Under Linux, I like "lftp" - does http, ftp, https, sftp, ftps etc. Can also script it, add bookmarks, create aliases - and it supports resuming via "mget -c <glob>". Seems there's a windows version, but I'm not sure how it works.
For quickly sucking down files, look at "wget" (windows port available also). It supports resuming "wget -c" and authentication (wget ftp://user:pass@host/file) but ${usual_warning_about_packet_sniffers_in_public_places}, etc.
Hope that helps...
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I was baiting Bridget99, I wasn't expecting anyone else to offer advice :) I wanted to know whether he'd suggest somethng sensible. wget is of course very handy.
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@bridget99 said:
But I do abhor FileZilla (the client, at least) and all the other "pretty" FTP programs out there.
I use FileZilla when I have a lot of data to upload - for some reason I often can't max out my uplink with a single transfer, but with 4 (even to the same server) I can, and since FileZilla does parallel uploads automatically, this makes it superior over any program that doesn't (no, opening 4 instances of command-line ftp doesn't count, since I'd have to split the files in 4 groups manually, needlessly wasting time).
For FTP downloads, the web browser is usually sufficient (and when it's not, wget normally is).
BTW, I've got a newer Windows version of wget hosted here.
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@Salamander said:
I lose a great deal of respect for anyone who stubbornly thinks that command line tools are always the be-all end-all of problems.
It's not the fact that command line FTP has any particular UI that appeals to me; it's the fact that it is the default, OS-supplied program for FTP. Having worked quite a few different jobs in my career, I can tell you that just about every place I walk into has some favorite little FTP client that they've built processes and programs around. When I build a process or program, I build it around the OS-supplied FTP tool because I think that's the right thing to do. I don't want to deal with learning something else, with its own little quirks, constant updates, and so on.
The same holds true for terminal emulation. Nobody seems willing to just use Hyperterminal, and this creates problems. When I'm trying to get support from the people on the other end of the connection, for example, all of those fancy, scriptable terminal emulators just create problems. They give the person on the other end of the connection the opportunity to say something like "oh... you're using Terminaut 2000... that may be the problem; in any case, we can't support it." As a result, I typically end up using Hyperterm anyway, if only to humor the people attempting to support me. This is a problem, because I have to figure out how to create all of that stupid Terminaut scripting and figure out how to recreate it in Hyperterm. This is a fantastic waste of time, and the attempt to avoid Hyperterm is ultimately unsuccessful anyway, since I end up using it.
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@bridget99 said:
When I build a process or program, I build it around the OS-supplied FTP tool because I think that's the right thing to do.
Wait … you build software that talks to ftp.exe? Seriously? That's not even a good attempt at trolling.
